The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In oilfield applications, the drilling process can be impeded by a wide variety of problems. Accurate measurements of downhole conditions, rock properties and surface equipment allow many drilling risks to be minimized and may also be used for detecting when a problem has occurred. At present, most problem detection is the result of human vigilance, but detection probability is often degraded by fatigue, high workload or lack of experience.
Merely by way of example, in oilfield applications, some limited techniques have been used for detecting the occurrence of one of two possible rig states using a single input channel. In one example, a technique may be used to automatically detect if a drill pipe for drilling a hydrocarbon well is either “in slips” or “not in slips”. This information may be used to gain accurate control of depth estimates, for example in conjunction with activities such as measurement-while-drilling (MWD) or mud logging. To tell whether the drill pipe is “in slips,” the known technique generally only uses a single input channel of hookload data measured on the surface. Another example of making a determination between two possible rig states is a technique used to predict if the drill bit is “on bottom” or “not on bottom.” Again, this method makes use of only a single input channel, namely block position, and is only used to detect one of two “states” of the drilling rig.
In the oilfield industry there is a need to automate process/applications and to monitor the automated processes and applications. This automation and monitoring may require monitoring of one or more streams of data and interpretation of the data.
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